


strangers in the night

by finalizer



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, Hux is Not Nice, M/M, ft. hux’s daddy issues, honestly this is more a character study than anything else, they're both emotionally stunted wrecks and it's a mess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-18
Updated: 2017-10-18
Packaged: 2019-01-16 19:32:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12349230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/finalizer/pseuds/finalizer
Summary: “You’re thinking,” Ren says, and it sounds like a question.





	strangers in the night

“You’re thinking,” Ren says, and it sounds like a question.

It’s not always alcohol that inspires brutal honesty, the deep and candid words that would otherwise remain locked up in the recesses of their minds. That’s not to say drunk confessions never ensue — they do, on occasions where Hux breaks out the liquor, and Ren fails to hold it. 

But there’s other kinds of bliss that leave one loose limbed and loose lipped, aching in all the right places, willing to divulge more than usual. It’s a slip of mind that’s not always intentional and tends to leave behind a bitter taste of lingering regret.

“Acute observation.”

The sheets rustle at his side but Hux doesn’t drop his eyes from the dull ceiling. 

“You’re purposefully taking offense. As if anyone could deny your mind never stops working. You know what I mean. _Now_ , after. You never think this loud — _after_.”

“Don’t flatter yourself, Ren.”

Ren dances around the word _sex_ , and Hux finds himself wanting to smile at how blatantly _Ren_ that is. He doesn’t know why the muscles in his cheeks coax the corners of his lips upwards; he’s surprised for a moment, before grinding his teeth together to clamp his jaw into submission. He tries to clear his head of any thoughts, any leftover sentiments being broadcast loud enough for his notoriously eavesdropping bedmate to pick up on.

He asks, for the sake of it, “What am I thinking?”

He turns his head to find Ren already facing him, on his side, propped up on his elbow. It should be disconcerting, how quietly Ren rearranges himself into positions advantageous for prying — he’s always there, around the proverbial corner, ready to stick his fingers in places his fingers don’t belong. 

“It’s a jumble,” Ren says, “nothing eloquent. Something is bothering you, I just don’t know what.”

“Other than you?”

Ren’s an open book. He doesn’t hold back his humored smile, doesn’t guard his reactions to intimacy as valiantly as Hux. It’s why he wears the mask, after all, to do the work for him. He looks Hux in the eye, and Hux doesn’t shy away; more so out of spite and sheer force of will than genuine desire to place himself on the precipice of something so dangerously resembling a semi-functioning relationship.

“You haven’t ordered me out yet.”

Hux doesn’t miss a beat. “As if you ever adhere to my commands.”

“Say the word,” Ren offers — teasing, taunting, knowing full well the last thing Hux wants at the moment is for him to leave. “Say the word and I’ll be gone.”

Hux doesn’t take the bait. “Stay, then. Stop staring, maybe. It’s eerie. Go to sleep.”

Their gazes remain locked for a moment, then another, until Hux blinks and looks away. He turns back to the ceiling, to the seamless plates of durasteel welded together, a dreary endless expanse lulling his eyes closed. He doesn’t know what time it is, or how long it’s been since he last allowed himself a proper night of rest; it feels like days — a week, or even two. He stays that way for a while, in the plane transcending consciousness and oblivion. It’s wrong to push his body the way he does, and he knows it, but he’s not quite exhausted enough to sleep like the dead yet, not when he could likely push himself for a few more hours before collapsing.

“You’re feeling inadequate. Why?”

The unexpected question pulls him back. Ren is still looking at him, frozen in place as if he hadn’t moved a single muscle since Hux attempted to drift off.

“That’s an offhand idea.”

Ren frowns. “You asked me to decipher what you’re thinking of.”

“I asked you to be quiet,” Hux snaps, “while entertaining your curious nature. You can pick my brain apart in silence, can’t you?”

Ren is staring off at a point beyond Hux’s head, yet Hux can’t shake the feeling he’s looking right at him, right through him.

“You’re working yourself to death. But anyone can see that, really. You’re — and you’re thinking about your father.”

“That’s enough, Ren. Stop.”

Ren pops a grin, so sudden and out of place Hux feels like he’s caught in the middle of an absurd dream. Ren points at himself with his free hand, a flippant gesture, and echoes Hux’s words back at him. “Curious nature.”

Hux continues to glare. There’s heat to it, but Ren believes it to be superficial. He prods at Hux’s subconscious again, past the fleeting thoughts and buried memories he’s already examined, looking deeper, for something simpler yet harder to gauge — he pokes around in Hux’s emotions to make sure he won’t get himself jettisoned from the nearest airlock for continuing to pry. Hux’s feelings, though he claims not to have them, are fickle, and Ren prefers to stay on Hux’s good side when they’re in bed. Elsewhere, he leaves it up to chance.

He feels resistance, sees Hux grimace knowingly at the intrusion, and bites back a smile. For all his yammering and complaining about cosmic mysticism, Hux isn’t as insensitive to the Force as he thinks he is.

“Your curious nature isn’t reason enough to continue to worm your way inside when I explicitly tell you to stop.”

Ren hums idly and retreats, pulling back. He drops onto his back with a muffled thump and joins Hux in staring at the ceiling. 

“You could just tell me.”

Hux sits up abruptly, sheets pooling around his waist as he reaches for something at the bedside, instinctively, then drops his hand back into his lap without a word.

“That was in your mind too, from earlier,” Ren says. There’s an annoyingly smug edge to his voice. “How you’re out of cigarettes. You registered the tremor in your hands this morning, though you seem to have forgotten since then. What I think is — not that you asked, I know — you should knock yourself out, medicinally if not physically, for two cycles at least. One day you’re going to crumple to the ground, and you're not going to wake up. You’ll do the Resistance’s dirty work for them, exhaust yourself into an early grave.”

Hux stares at his lap. “You know when you’re tired, you lose yourself in  impractical thoughts and your mind floats off to places you’d rather it didn’t? It’s a rhetorical question, of course, you have your sentimental breakdowns twice daily.”

Ren doesn’t take the jab personally — he’s been on the receiving end of far worse words from Hux, been called worse names, been degraded in a way he never thought possible. And all that in the name of their fragile co-commandership. 

He watches as Hux lifts his head almost cautiously, how his hair sweeps over his forehead, long since escaped from its gelled confines. His eyes are dangerously clear, not at all the way one expects from someone flicking through harrowing memories, lost in the past.

“Since he —  _died_ — my father — I suppose I’d given it all more thought than it warranted.”

He trails off, and Ren waits for a moment before inquiring further. The temperature of the air around Hux seems to have dropped. “What, exactly?”

“You’re not a shrink, stay quiet — I’m indulging you, it’s the least you could do. I’ll talk when I see fit.”

“You don’t have to,” Ren says, softer than he’d intended, “if you don’t — ”

Hux glances up at him again, sharply, meets his eyes with a thinly veiled panic. He wants to talk, Ren rationalizes, he wants to get it all off his chest and has no one else who would listen. He has no one else he trusts.

“Just shut up,” Hux mutters weakly. He takes a breath to regain the composure that’d crumbled, tries to look bigger even without his greatcoat for added effect. “I’m — I’m continuing his legacy, is what I keep hearing. His old friends — _colleagues_ , he didn't have friends — think themselves important enough to tell me what an impressive job I'm doing, and so young, so _untrained_. Everything he’s told me, taught me, forced me to do, to think, to say, I’m doing it. At the same time, it appears, I’m not doing enough. There’s still so much, _so much_ , to get done before the galaxy forgets about him, until they hear Hux and don’t consider for a moment it could mean anyone but me.”

“You’ve already surpassed him,” Ren interjects, failing to keep his mouth shut like he’s been ordered to do. There’s something frightening about the dispassionate way Hux is talking, about how he doesn’t realize he’s drawing blood in his palms, scratching past the surface of his skin with his neatly trimmed nails.

“Not enough. He’d drag me through the mud, Ren. Worthless. Small. Inadequate. Weak. Easy to use, to manipulate, to discard. A follower, not a leader, he’d call me. Everything I achieved, he’d say, was thanks to him. He’d claim I owed him everything I had, everything I was. I was a worthless, less-than-nothing puppet. He’d consider me the embodiment of everything wrong with mankind. The way I talked, walked, made decisions, _breathed_ , even. Imagine if he knew I preferred men — now, wouldn't that just be the icing atop the cake,” Hux trailed off, phrasing the question as an observation, staring at nothing in particular: at a crease in the bedsheets, wide-eyed like he’d never given that particular matter any thought before this moment. 

“That bad?”

“Accusations of nepotism would be the least of my worries, likely. He’d go out of his way to disgrace me, find new and creative ways to sully my name — discreetly, of course, not to be traced back to him  — igniting and spreading rumors of how I got to my knees for superior officers left and right to get to where I am today so quickly and efficiently.”

On impulse, Ren asks, “Did you?”

Hux looks bemused for a moment. “Of course I did. Not that it changes anything. Besides, I’m confident they won’t go tattling.”

His tone is ice cold, laced with an almost manic edge of humor, and Ren understands they’ll stay quiet because they’re dead. There’s a beauty in Hux’s cruelty, how it becomes an art simply because it’s him enacting it. There’s something exhilarating in being the only one exempt.

“When my name spreads across the galaxy, I’ll make a point to do to him what he did to me: drag his name through the mud. Hells, I’ll take it a few steps further — maybe I ought to simply make sure no one knows him at all. And as the only one left, I’ll remember him for the monster he truly was. Or perhaps I’ll forget him, too, if I can. Extinguish the memory, grind it into the gravel — ” Hux pauses, pale and breathless, " — it's quite nice he's gone. If only — "

“Come here,” Ren says, interrupts, before he loses his nerve, or Hux launches into another chapter of his tirade, derailing from the neat conclusion he’d arrived at. 

Hux’s anger lingers in the air, the tremble in his hands close to radiating off in anxious waves. The bedsheets in his lap are smeared with blood from where he’d cut his palms. He’s shaking and it terrifies Ren — Hux never cries, would never cry, and there’s nowhere else for his repressed anguish to escape to.

Ultimately, he’s surprised at how easily Hux complies. Sparing a blank look at the crimson stains, he folds into Ren’s arms, his back to Ren’s chest. He’s quiet as he goes; he squeezes his eyes shut so hard it hurts, and inaudibly curses at himself for tensing when Ren’s arm winds around his waist to pull him close.

“You can’t hurt the dead.”

Ren’s voice is quiet and distant when it comes, and Hux doesn’t question the melancholy behind the words. He doubts he’d be able to choke out a coherent sentence without stuttering over his words like a sobbing child.

Still, the tears don’t come. It’s silent, at least, in his head — all the thoughts that ran rampant are gone now, leaving behind a hollow, deserted battlefield, the air still thick and suffocating with the echoes of a sickening past. He’s shown weakness, but Ren understands. Ren will, like him, wake up the next morning pretending nothing had happened. Ren will carry on as usual, pretending he doesn't realize it was Hux who made the calculated decision to cut his own father's life short.

“Don’t do anything _for_ him. Do it in spite of him. Forget him,” Ren goes on. There’s a seriousness to his tone that Hux doesn’t remember hearing before. But he’s already drifting, sleep heavy mind muddling together words and sounds, numbing the pain to a tolerable ache. “That way you don’t owe him anything.”

The words barely register, yet they’re a blanket of comfort. Hux feels it envelop him, warm and heavy, lulling him into the dark, and then his consciousness is snuffed out. He remembers the weight of Ren around him, and figures it’s as good a memory as any to take into the night.

 

**Author's Note:**

> well this basically happened bc the phasma novel got me pretty shooken.. although i doubt hux would feel haunted by any sort of remorse about what he did lmao
> 
> and yes, i namedropped [llyn's iconic fic title](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5836177/chapters/13450108) in there
> 
> [twitter](http://twitter.com/finaiizer) & [tumblr](http://badspacedads.tumblr.com)


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